October 07, 2008

Bitten by Performance Counter issues in Virtual Machine

I've been using virtual machines for software development for just over 3 years now. At this point, virtually all of my software development is done on virtual machines (no pun intended... it was just a side effect).

About 8 months ago, I started noticing a recurring issue on my virtual machines with regards to SQL Server 2005. I was regularly getting errors in the application event log about SQL Server 2005 performance counters. Since this was the only error I was getting, and SQL Server 2005 seemed to plug right along just fine despite these errors, I ignored them.

Fast forward 8 months to today. I've been using SQL Server 2008 in development projects for a few months now. I had one particular virtual machine that did not have SQL Server 2008 reporting services installed and I wanted to install it today. When I ran the installation wizard, it kept failing during initial check steps, reporting that there was a problem with the performance counters. In this case, it would not let me install reporting services withough resolving this issue. The details reccomended following the steps of Microsoft KB article 300956, "How to manually rebuild Performance Counter Library values".

I followed all of the steps of this KB article (not a quick task mind you), rebooted and started the installation again. Much to my chagrin, it failed due to the same performance counter check failing AGAIN..... UGH!

The short story here is that performance counters were disabled.... ALL OF THEM. Rebuilding them was a completely unnecessary step. I also know why they were disabled, and I will remember this for a LONG time to come.

I've been using VMOptimizer from Vizioncore (desktop version now discontinued) since before it was purchased by Vizioncore from Invirtus (or they merged, or whatever happend). There is a checkbox in the opimization options regarding disabling disk performance counters. Unfortunately, this is mislabled. It doesn't disable "disk performance counters", it simply turns off ALL OF THEM.

Guess when I started using VMOptimizer again.... say... about 8 months ago.

If you need any performance counters turned on, don't check this option or possibly suffer the same fate that I did.